23 June 2016
Week In Brief: INTERNATIONAL NEWS
Europe
AUSTRIA: The far-right Freedom Party is contesting the results of the recent presidential elections, which they lost by just 0.01% of the vote. A court will decide by July 6 whether to uphold the challenge.
CYPRUS: Two firefighters have died and one has been injured as huge forest fires have blazed out of control for more than three days.
EU: Envoys approved the renewal of the sanctions against Russia because of its involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The decision will go to ministers for formal approval this week.
FRANCE: President Hollande has accepted his Socialist party’s insistence that he should defend himself in a primary contest for the party leadership before next spring’s presidential elections. Recent approval ratings have shown him to be the most unpopular president in modern times. Polls show that former president Nicholas Sarkozy is the favourite to win the leadership of the Republican party this autumn.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was ordered to pay €10,000 damages after losing a civil court case brought against him by an anti-prostitution movement.
Russian and British football fans clashed again in Lille last Tuesday. Three Russian supporters have been jailed, and another – a leader of a Russian far right group – was expelled from France; he returned to France almost immediately and was arrested in Toulouse.
GERMANY: Reinhold Hanning, a 94 year old who was a member of the SS and a guard at Auschwitz during World War II, was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of people at the death camp in 1943 and 1944, and was sentenced to 5 years in prison.
ITALY: A spate of forest fires across Sicily destroyed ancient woodland and caused the evacuation of schools. There are allegations that the Mafia started them, to build on cleared ground or claim for damages.
Virginia Raggi, the Five Star Movement’s candidate, won the run-off in the elections for Rome’s mayor. She campaigned against the widespread corruption and inefficiency which is paralysing the city. The Five Star Movement won 19 out of the 20 mayoral elections (including Turin). Candidates of prime minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party were crushed.
NORWAY: Norway will increase its defence budget by £14 billion over the next 20 years. Its military upgrade will include 52 new fighter jets and four new submarines, to counter Russia’s increased might.
RUSSIA: The IAAF has banned Russia’s athletics team from competing in the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. The ban was imposed last November, following disclosures of state-endorsed doping, and now the governing body of world athletics has decided that Russia has failed to make sufficient improvements for the ban to be lifted for the Olympics.
The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating allegations of widespread drugs-cheating by Russia in the 2014 Winter Games at Sochi. The allegations claim that the Russian ministry of sport and Russian security services were involved in the cheating. The investigators are due to report their findings on July 15. Wada officials said that Russia could be banned from all Olympic events if the allegations are found to be true.
See comment A Sportsman’s Sketches.
Thirteen children – all orphans or from disadvantaged backgrounds – drowned when three boats carrying 47 children and four adults overturned on Lake Syamozero in Karelia. Five members of staff at the children’s holiday camp have been arrested, and regional officials detained, following claims that safety rules and previous complaints and bans had been ignored.
SPAIN: The re-run of last December’s inconclusive general elections takes place this weekend. Polling suggests that another deadlock is a possibility, with the new far left anti-corruption party Podemos just behind the PP (prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s centre-right People’s Party) and just ahead of the Socialists.
Middle East and Africa
AFGHANISTAN: The Taliban has renewed its attack on Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. US troops have been flown in to help in its defence.
There are reports that the Taliban is recruiting young boys, commonly used as sex workers among the Afghan government forces, to infiltrate the security services and kill policemen and soldiers.
BAHRAIN: Sheikh Issa Qassim, the spiritual head of Bahrain’s Shia community, faces expulsion after the country’s Sunni monarchy stripped him of his nationality. The move has triggered demonstrations and unrest among his followers, and an angry rebuke from Iran. In a further crackdown on dissent, the opposition party al-Wefaq has been suspended and its leader arrested. The critic Nabeel Rajab has been arrested again this week.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: Jean-Pierre Bemba, the former vice-president, has been found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to 18 years in prison by the international criminal court at The Hague. His Congolese Liberation Movement troops committed rape and murder in the Central African Republic in 2002.
EGYPT: Investigators have recovered both black boxes – the flightdeck sound recorder and the flight data recorder – of the crashed EgyptAir Flight 804 from the Mediterranean seabed. It will take weeks or months to retrieve information from them as they are both damaged.
President Sisi’s agreement to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia has been overturned by an Egyptian court. The agreement sparked huge protests when it was announced last April; demonstrators claimed that it was a sell-off of Egyptian territory in exchange for Saudi aid.
IRAQ: There are reports that some of the Shia militias involved in the battle to recapture Fallujah from Isis have been torturing and executing civilians fleeing the city. It is estimated that 43,000 of the mainly Sunni population had escaped from Fallujah; 6000 of them are men, who were detained and subjected to screening to make sure they aren’t Isis deserters. Iraqi authorities, acting on the reports, have arrested some members of the Shia coalition.
The screening was abandoned this week, however, as the refugee crisis became overwhelming. The UN says that 82,000 have now fled Fallujah, with 25,000 more on the way. Refugees are not being allowed to enter Baghdad, but are living in makeshift camps with minimal facilities or none at all.
The government has declared victory in Fallujah. Isis has withdrawn from checkpoints and has largely left the city, but Iraqi troops are still under mortar attack and sniper fire. They have begun to clear roadside bombs.
The government has declared a campaign to recapture Mosul, Iraq’s second city and the largest held by Isis.
ISRAEL: Palestinian authorities are complaining that an Israeli water-supply company has severely reduced the supply of water to the West Bank, just as the month-long Ramadan fast has begun and as summer temperatures are rising.
A freedom of information request revealed that prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife spent more than $500,000 in five days during a trip to New York to attend the UN general assembly.
NIGER: Three inches of rain – one year’s worth – fell in two hours in the desert of northern Niger. Floods kill three people and thousands of livestock, and destroy hundreds of homes and shops.
SOUTH AFRICA: President Zuma has been accused of anti-white racial hatred. A number of complaints have been made to the human rights commission, which has invited him to respond.
Demonstrations in Pretoria against a mayoral candidate escalated into rioting and looting, with violent mobs blocking roads, attacking shops and burning buses.
SYRIA: Russia has been accused of dropping thermite bombs (incendiaries even hotter than white phosphorous) and thermobaric bombs (the most powerful explosive, apart from nuclear bombs) on rebel-held areas of Aleppo. International conventions forbid the use of such weapons on civilian areas.
TURKEY: The interior ministry has revived paramilitary Village Guards, militias of loyalist Kurds, to fight against the PPK Kurdish separatists.
According to the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, Turkish border guards have shot dead at least 8 Syrians (including 3 women and 4 children) attempting to enter the country via a mountainous smuggling route. Eight others were wounded.
The authorities have banned next week’s gay pride march and a transgender pride march this week. Police used tear gas to break up a small protest against these bans.
President Erdogan announced that Gezi Park, a green space in central Istanbul, will be developed into luxury flats and a shopping centre, in spite of initial plans to build on it being overturned by a court after widespread and violent protest three years ago.
A gang of Islamists attacked a record shop where Radiohead fans were listening to a preview of the group’s new album. Riot police dispersed crowds protesting about the attack.
Far East, Asia and Pacific
INDIA: A number of arrests have been made following the revelation of wide-spread cheating across schools and colleges in Bihar state.
The government of Tamil Nadu state pledged to ban alcohol, and ordered liquor shops to close.
JAPAN: In Osaka, tens of thousands of protestors rallied to call for the withdrawal of US troops and the closure of their bases. Last April, a former US marine was found guilty of raping and murdering a young woman, and last month a drunken US sailor injured two local drivers when she crashed her car.
INDONESIA: Heavy rains have caused floods and landslides on the island of Java. At least 47 people have been killed, hundreds of homes have been buried under mud and rock, and thousands of homes have been inundated.
PAKISTAN: A young woman was murdered by her own father, mother and brother for rejecting an arranged marriage three years ago and marrying a husband of her own choice. She had a ten-month old daughter and was seven months pregnant.
PHILIPPINES: The USA, India and Japan are engaged in a naval military exercise, Exercise Malabar, off the coast of the Philippines.
Official figures suggest that at least 40 suspected criminals have died at police hands in the month since Rodrigo Duterte won the presidential election – four times the monthly average. Mr Duterte, who will be inaugurated next week, was previously the mayor of Davao where vigilante death squads dispensed extrajudicial killings.
America
BRAZIL: The governor of Rio de Janeiro state declared a “state of calamity” because of its ailing finances, and appealed for emergency federal funds to prevent “a total collapse”.
The tourism minister resigned over the Petrobas scandal.
A gang of at least 20 men armed with grenades and guns attacked a hospital in Rio and released a suspected drugs dealer who had been injured when arrested. A patient was killed and a nurse and policeman were wounded in the gunfight.
MEXICO: Gunmen opened fire on demonstrators in Oaxaca protesting about the jailing of two teachers’ union leaders. Six people were killed and 100 wounded.
USA: A two-year old boy playing on a beach beside the lake at a hotel in Florida was attacked and killed by an alligator.
The National Rifle Association and the Republican party admitted that anyone on an FBI watch list should be prevented from buying guns, as the Orlando massacre revives the debate about gun-control.
Donald Trump sacked Corey Lewandowski, the close aide who supports Trump’s natural approach. Paul Manafort, a veteran lobbyist and campaigner, was hired three months ago to develop a more polished and presidential style for Trump. There are reports that Mr Trump’s presidential campaign is short of funds, and that hundreds of Republican delegates are launching a movement to vote against his nomination at next month’s national convention in Cleveland, Ohio. See comment Nightmare On Pennsylvania Avenue.
VENEZUELA: Increasingly severe food shortages are leading to more rioting, looting and corruption. Health care and law and order are collapsing. An armed man attacked the central bank, wounding two security guards and taking a woman hostage before he was shot dead by the police.
Thousands of signatories of the opposition-backed petition calling for a referendum on President Maduro’s future are volunteering their finger prints and identity cards to prove their existence. There are two million signatures (only 200,000 are needed to trigger a referendum); President Maduro’s central election commission claims that 600,000 of them are fake. Volunteers have been queuing from dawn on each day of the five-day verification process. The government has been accused of stalling; there will be a presidential election if the referendum takes place this year, but the vice-president will simply take over if the referendum takes place next year.
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